My Goals and Resolutions for 2017: February Update

Each month, I want to share with you all how I’m doing on my goals for 2017. I hope this post inspires you in reaching your own goals! Can you believe we’re already one month done in 2017?! In December, I set some pretty ambitious goals for 2017, and broke them down into smaller goals for each month. I wanted to take a quick minute to share with you all my progress!

My Goals and Resolutions for 2017: February Update

Complete Courses, Webinars, and Challenges I’ve put off

Last month I completed a lot of really awesome course, challenges, and webinars.

I have loved documenting the 52 Weeks of Gratitude Challenge here on the blog, you can check it out here. I was pleasantly surprised by how difficult the topics have been so far. If you’re taking the challenge with me I’d love to know your thoughts!

I took the Evergreen Content Email Challenge last month, and I actually didn’t like it. I felt that it was extremely unhelpful and didn’t make much sense.

When you sign up for The Dating Divas Newsletter, you get access to the 7 Days of Love Challenge. I thought this was really unique challenge and enjoyed many of the activities in it.

If you are a blogger, you need to watch Allison’s List Building Bash Webinar! I don’t remember exactly how I stumbled across the webinar, but it is one I will probably use for the rest of my blogging career. In her webinar she lays out the strategies you need to start growing your email list and how to successfully create your own opt-ins and so much more. This is an all-inclusive guide to email lists that you don’t want to miss.

I am sad to say that I did fall off the wagon on the 365 Question Journal challenge. During the first few days I was able to easily fill it out each day, then over time I just grew too busy for it. I didn’t find the challenge to be all that interesting or unique, but I may come back to it at a later date.

Read 2 Books

I’m happy to report that not only did I reach this goal, but I even surpassed it! I started reading two more books toward the end of the month because I couldn’t wait to jump in!

I didn’t expect to read In Twenty Years this month, in fact I didn’t expect to read this book at all. After finishing The Recovering Spender quicker than I planned, I ended up checking out this book through Prime Reading so I had an audio book to listen to while in the car. I loved all of these books!

Start a Honeymoon Fund

After getting a lot of suggestions, we ended up setting up our honeymoon fund through Zola. Since we are getting married this year, I figured having an online honeymoon fund would be a great addition to our registry to help pay for our honeymoon. If you have never used Zola before I highly recommend it! It’s a great way to organize your registry and have a ton of different store registries all in one place.

Here’s our goal for this month:

Pay off our honeymoon debt

We pulled the trigger and booked our trip to Hawaii! While I was so excited to see this trip start to come together, it doesn’t mean it didn’t cost us a pretty penny. Our goal for this month is to start thinking about expenses we may have while we are in Hawaii and to start paying off our trip.

Eat out Less

We failed pretty miserably on this front. While we did eat out a fair amount during January, we were able to use gift cards for a number of them. At least that meant saving a little bit of money. Despite the amount of times we ate out, we actually started mastering the art of eating in! Just this week, the Fiance was really craving pizza. So rather than order pizza, we ate a frozen pizza and cheesy bread from the freezer! It’s not exactly gourmet, but it kept us from eating out!

Here’s our goal for this month

Only use gift cards to eat out this month

This doesn’t really sound like it would be a challenging goal, but for us this will be like torturing a mouse with cheese. Man I love cheese. Now that I am home full-time, this shouldn’t be too hard to do.

Completely Declutter and Minimize our Dining Room

I went into this month thinking this would be the easiest room in our home. However, our dining room was actually one of the most challenging rooms! Who would have thought! Despite the challenge I was able to completely declutter that space, leaving only our stockpile. We even got rid of our dining room table! I wrote a whole post on this here.

Here are the before and after photos:

Here’s this month’s project:

Competely Declutter and Minimize our Kitchen

Have Weekly Budget Meetings

Every Sunday during the month of January, the Fiance and I sat down and ran numbers for the week. We used our budget envelopes to make sure we were on track for the month, and to make sure we weren’t going over in any areas. I think this is one of the main reasons we were able to stay on budget last month.

Here’s this month’s goal:

Use Weekly Expense Trackers

One of the biggest problems we ran into during our weekly budget meetings was not being able to remember what we actually bought during the month. It was really difficult to remember if what we spent should’ve come out of an envelope or not. To make this go a little smoother this month, we are going to be using weekly expense trackers. Here’s the ones I’m using. They’re free and really cute! I’m also using the monthly expense tracker portion of my planner for while I’m on the go so I don’t forget any.

Plan one Special Date Night

Since my Fiance and I moved in together, we stopped taking the time to intentionally plan date nights. More often than not we would turn eating out at a restaurant into a date night, maybe a movie, and call it a day. So I made the decision that each month during 2017, I would make it my goal to plan one special date night each month for us.

This month’s date night was Spouse Scattergories. I cut up some slices of cheese and fruit, set out crackers, and poured two glasses of sparkling grape juice for us to enjoy with our treats. I will have a whole post about our at home date night on the blog February 22nd!

Here’s our goal for this month:

Plan one Special Date Night

This will be an ongoing goal and I’m really excited to plan another date night this month!